Page 56 of Bram

He pushed a finger into my asshole, and it was like a fucking trigger. It started at my core and the wet explosion washed over his cock and balls. He didn’t let go, only fucked me harder, his hips bucking as if he’d lost complete control.

I felt the warm spurts inside me, filling, pushing deeper with each thrust.

I came again, Bram inside my head the way no other man had ever been, my forehead banging the cold steel, breath trapped in my throat. He followed, his hands squeezing so hard I thought he’d leave bruises, and the thought of that—being marked—made the aftershocks stretch out, every nerve live and raw.

He bit me again, hard and bruise-worthy. “You’re mine,” he said.

“To the moon and back,” I replied.

“You’re fucking amazing, Julie Sparta.”

Although I fought them back, hearing my name coming off his lips brought tears to my eyes.

Afterward, I dressed first, running a finger around the waistband of my jeans to smooth the sting. He watched, then went for his own clothes, moving stiffly, wincing at the pull on his stitches. He grabbed his shirt from the camera and shrugged it on, not bothering to button it.

“You’ll be out by morning,” he said. “Feldman’s already lined up the DA from San Bernardino for the handoff. They’ll want a public apology. Maybe a few interviews.”

“I can do that,” I said. I sat back on the bunk, crossing my legs, feeling more myself than I had in years. “Thank you.”

He looked at me, his expression softening. “You did what you had to.”

“I know.”

He started to say something else, but the guard tapped the door. “Time.”

Bram leaned in, kissed me on the cheek, and then said, “All I want to give you is everything you want, Julie.” He left without looking back. The door closed. The lock scraped. I was alone again, but this time the silence felt full, not empty.

I lay back on the cot, eyes on the ceiling, and waited for the rest of my life to start.

twenty-two

Julie

Three days after I shot my father in the head, the desert heat came back in force. I watched the thermometer outside my office window crawl past 108, and all I could think was that my suit smelled like smoke and hospital disinfectant. The AC in the Barstow DA’s building had lost the war with the Mojave decades ago. Every surface inside was sticky, except for the metal arms of my chair, which burned if you touched them too quick.

Most of the office was empty. After the press conference, after the transfer of the Desert Scorpions to county jail, after the first round of AG interviews, my assistant gave up pretending to organize the backlog and spent her mornings stalking the vending machine. She left me alone except for urgent phone calls, which today meant zero. There was nothing left for anyone to do except wait for the next mess to roll in, or, in my case, finish the paperwork that would close out the biggest clusterfuck in Barstow law enforcement history.

The files were stacked in the dead center of my desk. Three red welts, so full they barely flexed, each one held together with binder clips. On the wall above, my degrees were framed in matching black wood, slightly off-level, as if I’d started a war with gravity and lost. I always stared at the gap between the UCSD diploma and the Bar when I needed to think. The gap bugged me more than the degrees.

I set my pen on the desk and flexed my hand, watching the red dent slowly refill in the flesh between thumb and forefinger. I’d written so much that morning the ink bled through three carbonless forms and stained the blotter underneath. My handwriting was turning into a doctor’s scrawl, and if anyone needed to subpoena these files five years from now, good luck.

For a second I let myself close my eyes and listen. The click of the air vent, the faint grind of a printer spooling up somewhere down the hall, a fly beating itself to death against the strip light overhead. It was almost peaceful. Almost.

I’d spent the last several years putting abusers behind bars without ever confronting my own. Now that I had, I finally understood the underlying good I’d been doing. Though my pain and trauma would never completely go away, I was a few steps closer to living a normal, happy life.

The intercom on my phone lit up with a red strobe. I stared at it for a second, then thumbed the button.

“Yeah?”

“Ms. Sparta, Bram Jackson is in the lobby.” The assistant’s voice was flat, office-robot perfect. She’d stopped asking questions about him after the first time he showed up with a bloodstain on his jeans and left a bootprint on the waiting room carpet. “Do you want to see him?”

“Is he alone?”

“Looks like it.”

I exhaled. “Send him up.”

“Copy.”